links for 2009-11-06

An excellent summary of working with TFS and external merge tools…One of the extensibility points we have in Team Foundation V1 is that you can configure any other diff and merge tools you want. The purpose of this article is to start collecting the most common ones we know or heard about in a central place so people don't have to figure these out on their own. This UI is available via tools -> options -> source control -> visual studio team foundation server -> "configure user tools" button or via the command-line with "tf diff /configure"

This is the Microsoft platform playbook for application architecture. You can think of it as a set of blueprints, and as your personal mentor for building common types of applications on the Microsoft platform: mobile, RIA, services, and Web applications.

Based on the fact that REST web services have become increasingly popular with both web and enterprise developers, we received feedback from the community that the lack of controlling access to REST web services is one of the major pain points faced by service developers today. As interoperability remains a goal of ours, this means that we will simplify the approach to ACS so that access control scenarios integrate well with REST. The approach is also designed to continue to appeal to all developers that want an easy way to take advantage of Service Bus and Access Control Service or use these services from non-Microsoft platforms. Meanwhile, we remain committed to our ongoing goals of enabling SSO and authorization for websites, supporting WS-*, and federating with a greater variety of web and enterprise identity providers, in a future release.